Thursday, October 29, 2009

Onyxia 10, or "Did I Just Have . . . A GOOD TIME Raid Healing?!"

I have three 80s: a raid character (Dusty), a PVP character (Plum), and a character that stands around looking pretty (Birdy). They have their jobs and I try to stick to them.

I'm also spoiled. I admit it. I usually only do things with my brother and his wife, who've raid-healed over half of our guild's 10-mans for Wrath; my husband, who keeps his gear in sparkling shape; and my husband's best friend, who has 8 characters and reasonable raid gear on all of them (yay alt raids).

I also spent months pimping out my raid character's shadowy dps gear to get my pretty bird (yes, that's how to get me to care about gear), so she's now fit to enter and pwn any of the current raids. She even occasionally heals 5-mans (dual spec ftw!), but that's rare because I have the 2 best raid healers in the guild in my immediate family (I'm totally biased, but they really are very skilled and experienced).

So a friend, we'll call her Cutiepiefrenchname, put together an awesome 25-man Onyxia tonight and I went on my PVP character and healed it. Yes, I know, gasp at me mixing genres, but Plum could use a new weapon and my raid character is set for gear.

25-man goes great and I drank caffeine for dinner (which I never do), so I was still wired and agreed to the 10-man after.

Begin scene of trying to fill spots and get enough heals, enough tanks, more than 1 ranged, and a friend of mine (call her SnugglebuttDK) all in the raid. We have 2 spots left, 1 of those for a tank. I offer to change to my raid character as dps for more ranged, but if I do that then my friend SnugglebuttDK can't go because we'd need another healer to take my vacated heal spot.

Yadda yadda, SnugglebuttDK gets in and I stay on my PVP character to heal. Husband isn't there, brother and his wife aren't there, and even though husband's best friend (HBF) is there, it's just one of his many alts. Only HBF and Cutiepiefrenchname are ranged.

As we enter, I'm nervous. I keep offering in whispers to switch to dps if it seems viable, but it doesn't. Perhaps brother and wife could've 2-manned the heals with no sweat, but for our group we really did need three.

By the third round, SnugglebuttDK has stopped running through the tail cleave.

By the fourth, the rogues have stopped getting hit by the big add's aoe and I've stopped standing where the whelps come in.

We stopped after that fourth try, but on that try we all survived the first phase and we progressed to the third with only 2 down and I battle-rezzed Cutiepiefrenchname the moment she hit the dirt in phase two and nobody carried us, and I'm so proud of how everyone pulled it together I could bake (shut up, I bake when I want to reward people).

So even though we didn't down the boss, I'd call the 10-man a success. Not as a loot-mongering event, but as a training exercise. I paid attention so hard in try 4 that my eyes burned, and I think everyone left a better raider tonight. Myself included.

2 comments:

I can sympathize with the troubles you had. Raid healing on a PvP character can be painful because they itemize STA and pure Spell Power over INT, which gives you a much larger mana pool and allows for minor mistakes in mana management (for example, I'm sticking pure +20 INT gems in all my new gear because it's just so much better at this level of healing than any amount of SP or Crit). Onyxia is a long encounter and if ANY of the DPS let themselves get cleaved, tail swiped or deep breathed there goes a couple of very important Phase 3 heals for Mr. Tank. Eventually you just run out of juice and can't make up for the hits the tank is taking during the fears.

I've been playing since January '07 and have several less awesome characters. My real life profession is writing, and I've been married since my junior year of college. Whenever that was.

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Contrary to popular belief, my favorite color is not, in fact, pink. It's blue. But in a game built mainly for guys, I get excited about any girly additions and consider it my duty and my pleasure to gush over them.